Exactiy twenty years ago the late Mr. Wingrove Cooke described with all the vividness of an experienced word painter the sights which he witnessed in the gaol at Canton. No disgusting feature was omitted by the Times' correspondent, who was bent on producing a ghastly and loathsome picture. He wrote of one cell, "the thick stench could only be endured for @ moment, but the spectacle was not one to look long at. A corpse lay at the bottom of the den, the breast, the only fleshy parts, gnawed and eaten away by rats. Around it and upon it was a festering mass of humanity, still alive. The mandarin gaoler, who seemed to wonder what all the excitement was about, was compelled to have the poor creatures drawn forth, and no man who saw that sight will ever forget it. They were skeletons, not men This was the worst of the dens we opened, but there were many others which fell but few degrees below it in their horrors, There was not one of the 6,000 prisoners we saw whose appearance before any assemblage of Englisbmen would not have aroused cries of indignation."
Now, have we any reason to believe that the treatment of prisoners in Chinese dan is improved since that hideous jail delivery at Canton? We conceive that cruelties every whit as horrible are practised by the Man. derinate all over the Empire, whenever they have an opportunity of inflicting them, and unfortunately their oppor. tunities are too numerous. Now, when the vile practises of the King of Naples were disclosed to a shuddering public opinion by Mr. Gladstone in 1851; and in later days, when the Bul. garian atrocities were presented with dramatic, perhaps melo-dramatic, effect to the eyes of civilized Europeans, there were shouts of condemnation but in China similar atrocities are allowed to go on, no man forbidding them. There was a shiver twenty years ago, but no serious effort has ever been made since to stop these iniquities, Perhaps we shall be told that this account of the horrors undergone by the prisoners in the dungeon of Canton did excite a prejudice against the Chinese, It was naturally argued that the nation which allowed such savage cruelties to be practised, must be ina very low state of civilization, Woe do not wonder at this conclusion, for a story of torture and suffering is always remembered, when particulars which go to prove the civilization of a country are forgotten or passed over. We recollect when, in popular geographies for the uso of schools, almost the only particular named about the city of Calcutta was its black hole, This the history of European intercourse with India which made an indelible impression, and in like manner the dreadful picture of prison lif sketched by Wingrove Cooke remained stamped in the mind of British public speakers and writers, when they spoke or wrote of China, That is to day, it remained'for a time; but the fair professions of the officials at Poking, and the weakness of our own Government at Home, soon induced a sort of languid belief that the Chinese were mending their ways, and that gradually the liberal and humane institutions of the West were taking the place of the old savage customs which bad excited a thrill of horror, when described in the Times so many years ago. New impressions, new sensations, now objets of interest, succeed each other with great rapidity at Home. The recollect tion of a tale of misery is thrast aside by the nowest political agitation, or the latest burning question which it suits the policy of the Government to kindle; and after all, when there are so many legal abuses to remedy in the administration of every Buropean country, it can hardly be expected that the cruelties of the Chinese prisons can be very seriously considered. This is the easy way of shelving tie matter, but luckily we are perfectly well aware that lat any momenta selfish object could be gratified, there are Liberals in England
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.